


a fair and pleasant remedy

by gatheringbones



Series: such wolves as you [2]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Caretaking, F/M, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-25
Updated: 2015-09-25
Packaged: 2018-04-23 06:43:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4866977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gatheringbones/pseuds/gatheringbones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something is buried in her memories of the Conclave, and Lavellan intends to find out. Solas helps.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a fair and pleasant remedy

* * *

__

_"If she had touched me," he said very softly, "I would have been hers and not my own, not ever again. I wanted her to touch me but I could not let her.”_

-Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

* * *

In her defense, it all went quite well until it very abruptly didn’t.

She swallowed his startlement, chased it to the hinge of his jaw with her fingers and pressed down to pin it where she found it. His mouth was raw, uncomposed, uncollected—he seemed transfixed between pulling away and pressing closer and she delighted in it, almost cut loose and laughed at it. She settled for leaving the quick imprint of teeth on his lower lip as his breath escaped him like he’d taken a blow.

In _his_ defense, he didn’t _entirely_ leap back like someone sharply realizing they had a mouthful of spider legs.

But honestly, it was close.

 

* * *

“I am _so_ sorry,” she said miserably, after.

“It’s quite all right. Really.”

“I didn’t _know_ ,” she said. “You were just, _there_ , and I was there, and I’m _asleep_ , I couldn’t know any better!”

“The fault is mine,” he said. “I should have realized beforehand.”

“And done what?” she demanded. “Set wards? _Lip_ wards? Mystical _lip wards_ to protect you from sudden _assaults?”_

“Please,” he said, looking approximately fifty thousand years older. “Do not feel you need to keep referring to it as that.”

She rested her forehead on her fists and leaned forward, still sitting on a helpful outcropping of stone as the grass swayed in an unfelt wind all around them. Overhead, things that looked very much like birds wheeled and danced and asked each other complicated questions in flawless Rivaini. Laeta tried not to resent them too much.

“All right,” she said finally, muffled by her wrists. “All right. We start over. We forget, _that._ We start from the beginning.”

She straightened her back, composing herself as much as she was physically capable. She folded her hands ruthlessly in her lap until she fancied she could hear bones grinding.

Realizing where she was helped in its own way—she was in the Fade, and worse, she was aware of it. White-hot embarrassment and whatever _else_ she might be feeling had another name here, and that name was Demon Bait.

“Shall we,” said Solas, then stopped to cough quietly into his hand. “Shall we begin, then?”

He didn’t look much the worse for wear, to be honest. He stood straight and easy and wore more or less what he wore in the waking world—soft linens over old comfortable leathers that bore no resemblance to anything Laeta had ever seen on anyone before.

(She was just thankful her dreaming self had seen fit to have her wearing _anything._ She did not entirely believe in anything resembling the Maker, but would have been willing to break ground on a new Chantry on the spot if He’d appeared then and there to take credit.)

Solas did look better here. Even if he had his absolutely mildest expression on complete lockdown on his face, and stood somewhat diagonally from her, as if ready to push off with his feet at a moment’s notice.

Possibly relaxed wasn’t the word she’d use, but, better. More at home.

She wouldn’t begrudge him that. Home was where you made it. She of all people knew that.

“Yes,” she said abruptly, rising to her feet. “Let us do that.” Then paused, uncomfortably.  “But us also  pretend,” she said with utmost care, “that I have absolutely no memory of what we were actually planning on doing.”

It was _different_ when she was asleep.

When she was meditating, she was aware of everything going on in both places—the cramp in her calf, the itch on her nose, the overwhelming dread that Commander Cullen was going to walk in at any second and think she was summoning demons in the heart of his fortress, little things.

Asleep, everything…. blurred together.

It also didn’t help that ordinarily when she slept she didn’t dream at all. Sleep snatched her in its teeth for the sole five or six hours in a day when she was not being summarily forced to tend to something else—when she slept, she slept like a rock plummeting down a dark well.

This—whatever this was— took more energy, even if she was technically dead to the world in her bed.

Not to mention the fact that she kept, forgetting that there were boundaries in close working relationships and that there were things one simply didn’t do.

On the other hands, Solas had snapped so much back to his usual self that it was more than a little eerie.

“You asked me,” he said, leaning on a staff that she was fairly certain he hadn’t had two minutes ago, his expression pleasant (but truthfully, rather fixed), “to aid you in recovering the memories you lost just before the explosion at the Conclave.”

A small tremor ran through her.

Overhead, the things that looked like birds abruptly changed direction as if the wind had switched on them, and the tenor of their voices dropped an octave or two.

“Ah,” she said.

She looked up and around. The grass continued to wave lethargically, the bird-things continued to sing,  and all around them rolling hills spread as far as the eye could see. There, in the distance, glittered something like a lake, with a dark smudge of an island at the center.

“This, is not the Conclave,” she said neutrally.

Solas shifted slightly. “No,” he said. “I imagine the transition to true sleep was too disorienting. I did not expect we would meet directly there, in any case. You are not a Dreamer, and the last time we, I,” he coughed again. “Well. You seemed to have difficulty remembering why we were there. I am to keep you focused.”

“Why here?” she asked. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Have you not?” he said, seemingly glad to move on to another  track. He looked around, expression as mild as toast. “It’s pleasant enough. Perhaps you invented it yourself.”

Laeta squinted at the island in the distance. She didn’t think she’d invent something this, desolate. Even when she dreamed of the countryside her Clan wandered (the closest thing to _home_ she supposed she would ever have), she dreamed of the moss-choked meandering river valleys she’d grown up in, where the trees spanned ten feet across and the rivers ran steep and white with foam.

Also, the island seemed to have a building on it. The only time Laeta dreamed of buildings was when she was dreaming of setting fire to the admissions center of the University of Orlais.

“Well,” she said, rising dubiously to her feet and brushing literally imaginary dust from her flanks. “Then I expect we’d best get started.”

“Yes,” he said, and oh, the staff was gone again. Right. She blinked at him as he crossed the distance between them to stand before her. Embarrassment rose like a demon in her chest—distantly she wondered why spirits turned to rage and hunger when humiliation was such a perfectly good maelstrom of emotion—but she held her ground.

Solas’s face wasn’t entirely devoid of sympathy, and his voice was gentle. She was grateful for that. “Focus,” he said. “Dreams are malleable, and location is an illusion here. Think back to the Temple of Sacred Ashes, when you first arrived. I will help you make the transition.” He raised his hands, holding them carefully at a distance from either side of her face. He was not remotely touching her.

Laeta took a breath and nodded. She closed her eyes.

The smells of grass and wide open country still filled her nostrils. They were the wrong ones. The Temple had smelled like incense and horse sweat, and of humans so closely packed together that the air itself took on their particular flavor of cooked meat and unwashed leather. There had been stone underfoot, more paved stone than she’d ever seen before in her life, and—

“Yes,” said Solas softly, somewhere. “That will do.”

The world formed a river under her feet, and she wondered if that was him, somehow. There was no wrench, no sudden jerk from one location to the next, but she knew they had begun to move somewhere along the line and hoped with all her might that where they ended up held all the answers she needed.

* * *

_“Inquisitor.”_

“Oh—for the love of—Fuck. Fuck. _Fuck_. _Shitting_ —I’m SORRY. I AM SO SORRY.”

* * *

She had her hands over her face again, and was sitting on a barrel piled with several others at the entrance to the Temple. All around them came the sounds of horses and men, and the faraway ring of the Chant as the Sisters fulfilled their duties.

A groan or two escaped her intermittently.

It went on for quite some time.

Solas was not looking at her. He was so comprehensively not looking at her that he seemed utterly unable to look at anything else. He had his eyes closed, and was currently standing a good eight feet away from her. One of his hands was at his temple.

On the whole, he looked considerably less calm.

“I’ll wake up,” she said miserably. “I’ll, we can just call this off. We can try this another time. Or, never. We can never ever do this again and also never mention it. Ever.”

“That is a very kind sentiment, but I doubt that will be possible,” he said, not opening his eyes in the slightest. “You took herbs. Their efficacy lasts for several hours—I doubt you will be able to wake until dawn, at the very least.”

Haggard, that was the word.

He looked haggard.

Laeta groaned again, bending double at the waist.

She had since given up all pretense at controlling her emotions, but thus far no demons had appeared to sink their teeth into her neck and drag her off to the furthest reaches of the Fade. She chalked this up to the inherent unreliability and shiftlessness of demons, and was on the whole very upset about it.

But it was worse than that.

This was the Temple—her real and actual memories of it—and as much as she wanted to remember what _happened_ that day when the world had cracked in half and punched a hole in the sky, she had never wanted to be anywhere near it again.

She even recognized where she was sitting. This was the corner she’d retreated to after that horrible first day when there had been Templars everywhere and humans everywhere _else_ , and all the elves she’d seen had been Circle mages so clearly frightened out of their minds they couldn’t even register her. Some of them had had their tattoos—real vallaslin, not the painstaking facsimiles created by city elves desperate to reach for their heritage, as if they had been snatched from their clans just after reaching their majority. It had horrified her.

Laeta had made a terrible spy. Spies _knew_ things, or at the very least, knew how to find them out.

True, the place had been crammed to the rafters with other spies, some just as inept and obvious as her (most memorably a group of Carta dwarves pretending to sell fine dwarven crafts direct from Orzammar) but few of them had been elven, and none of them Dalish. It had been a nightmare. Almost as bad as the one she was presently in.

She looked down. And ah yes, her clothes were as they had been. Shapeless human cast-offs with bunching folds and more extraneous buckles than she’d known what to do with. What were humans keeping strapped _down_ anyways? Ribs? Innards? Sinful thoughts?

Solas exhaled hard through his nose.

He opened his eyes very carefully, and turned to face her. His staff was back. She wondered if it made him feel like he had an air of professionalism. _One_ of us has to, she thought before she could stop herself.

“We can still do what we set out to do,” he said. “And you can still reach what you came here to discover. Memory hides in dreams, but it can be tracked and found, just like any quarry.”

“I don’t know _why_ I don’t remember,” she said, twisting her hands once more. “I’ve tried as hard as I can—I’ve retraced every step in my mind, I’ve thought back as much as I can, but at a certain point there’s just,” she gestured helplessly, “nothing.”

“You were there when hundreds of people lost their lives in a single instant,” he said, and Creators, he must have been better at composing himself than she’d ever dare imagine, because the gentleness seemed genuine, and untainted by discomfort. “You were at the epicenter. You were not responsible, but that much death—”

Solas made his own gesture, as if encompassing the whole of the situation, then brought his hands together. “It would be traumatic,” he said soberly. “Highly traumatic. And trauma, splinters. It breaks the threads holding the weave together.”

“But surely I would _remember_ ,” she said dully. “I remember everything, it’s my duty.”

“It could be that you do not wish to,” he said very quietly. “And duty is an unforgiving master. It forgets, sometimes, that trauma often intercedes.”

Laeta absorbed that as best she could. The bones in her hands creaked as she gripped them together. The Mark was quiet in her hand—glowing faintly, but quiet. The ever-present buzz it gave off traveled up her arm as it always did, pulsing with her heart rate, but it was a part of her now. It was dependable, and it was part of her duty as well

She was back, in this island of stone and fear. She had never meant to come back—earlier she would have claimed not to even want to know how the explosion at the Conclave had happened—but she remembered the urgency now. She remembered the fear and confusion on Cassandra’s face, and the gentle questions put to her by Leliana. She remembered the discussions around the war table about how Corypheus had managed it, and how they might prevent such a thing in the future.

And she remembered how Solas had offered to help her.

If she gripped her hands any tighter, she would break something. She relaxed them at once, her skin gone pale from the lack of blood flow before fading back to their burnished brown.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

Solas didn’t quite flinch, but it was a near thing.

“Not about that,” she said quickly. “No—I mean. Thank you. I hadn’t considered that.”

She stood, uncertainly. Overhead, the green sky wheeled and churned in a way that would be very distressing if she looked at it for very long, but she wasn’t here to look at it.

She was here for Temple, and what she remembered of it.

Slowly, she said, “I think, this is the morning in question. I think what’s going to happen is going to happen very soon.”

There had been more horses, more baggage. The Temple grounds hadn’t been enough to hold them all. Everyone had been packed as tightly together as anyone could imagine, and the resulting friction made things ugly and dangerous.

“I see,” said Solas. “Then perhaps it would be best if we followed what you remembered.”

Laeta did flinch then. It wasn’t a near thing.

She gripped the excess fabric at her hips and steadied herself. Closing her eyes for a beat or two, she said, “This way. I remember what I did, to begin with anyway.”

She lead and he followed, his staff tapping along with him like a heartbeat.

* * *

“I found them that morning. I’d heard, things. But I wanted to see them for myself.”

“I see.”

“Yes. It was a bit—much.”

The things wearing the faces of men and women of the Circle all turned their heads to look at them at once. It was both deeply unsettling and unkind of them.

The brands on their foreheads glowed like eyes.

Solas was behind her left shoulder. Her awareness of him came in waves—but then, perhaps that was him just expending effort to keep the dream intact and her from getting distracted. It seemed to get…. disrupted if they changed locations abruptly, and ever since they had traveled by foot, no more blinking from place to place with the illogic of dream travel. She was grateful for this—she truly was—but the journey here had been fraught, to say the least. Things that looked like Templars and Circle mages did their best to look as she remembered them—but she was all too aware of where she was, and the role spirits played in dreams. She supposed she was grateful they were playing their parts so faithfully—the Templars were just as huge and metallic and implacable as she remembered them, and her terror was just as palpable.

No, she thought. She might have room for terror anywhere else; she might make a space for it and deal with it as best she could _anytime_ else, but this was neither the time nor the place.

“I wanted to see them,” she said, and steadied her voice as best she could. “I don’t know _why_ I did, but it mattered. I wanted to see the price the Chantry thought it necessary they pay.”

They had grouped them together by some unspoken consensus, all the Tranquil the Circles had brought with them. They weren’t like sheep or other livestock—they didn’t protest their confinement or demand fripperies like food or blankets or water.

They sat. They endured.

“The Circles didn’t want to hide them away, I think,” she said. “They wanted them out in the open, where everyone could see. But still, no one paid any attention to them. They were taken from their routines, their livelihoods. They likely had no idea why they were here, but they didn’t see it as important anyways. One of them,” she swallowed. “One of them asked me if I needed any task that needed doing.”

“Is there anything I can assist you with, my lady,” said one of the things that looked like a Tranquil nearest her, as if on cue. Its voice was as slow and measured as the chimes of a bell.

After a very long pause—

“No,” said Laeta very softly. “That’s very kind of you, but no thank you.”

The sounds of the blacksmith behind them had cut out as soon as the Tranquil spoke, but presently, they clanged back to life. The hum of the Temple resumed around them, tinged with unease, as ever.

Solas shifted behind her, the butt of his staff scraping against the stone. Presently, he said “How did you avoid their notice? What was your cover?”

She laughed. “ _What_ cover, honestly. I had planned to tell anyone who asked that I had escaped from the Circle in my youth, not knowing that they had ways to track people who did that. But no one ever asked. There were so many spies here I was just another drop in the bucket.”

She gripped her wrist where it protruded from the ill-fitting sleeve. “And everyone was so afraid,” she added.

“Your Keeper must have known your appearance would be questioned,” he said placidly.

Laeta grimaced, and turned away from the sea of quiet Tranquil. “My Keeper never wanted me to set out on this fool’s errand to begin with. I told her it was necessary, that Wycombe was getting more and more dangerous and we _needed_ to keep stronger tabs on Chantry nonsense just so we would know where the next explosions would be coming from.”

She paused. “I suppose I was a roaring success, in that respect.”

She turned back towards him, laughing badly. “I had visions, I think, of running into other Dalish contacts. Hearing news of family abroad. All I heard was the same stories that had been trickling to us up North for months—clan after clan just,” she waved a hand irritably, “vanished. Rubbed out. Or gone so deep into hiding that they might as well be.”

“Were you close enough to the talks to get a bearing on them?” he asked. “Whether they were going good or ill?”

She bit her lip. “I tried, once,” she said. “It was a disaster. The main body of the Temple was crammed to the ceiling with people, they were bursting out the doors.” She looked up. “There, see,” and pointed.

The Temple loomed before them across the courtyard. Soaring arches and windows rose to the very peak of the building, a wonder in sculpted stone. The sun broke over the top like a cresting wave and all was light and beauty and the kind of permanence that only humans seemed able to create these days.

She had supposed she was supposed to begrudge them for that—but it was beautiful. She very rarely had it in her to begrudge beauty.

As if reaching the proper page in the stage play, the sound of the Conclave began to rise to a dull roar from the open doors of the Temple, and yes, there were the crowds, spilling out from the nave in their hundreds with the very farthest reaches of the throng doubtlessly completely unable to hear what was going on. Templars and mages and rebels and soldiers all smashed and pulverized together—distrusting each other as much as they distrusted the integrity of the talks, the smell of ozone and lyrium rising to choking levels.

She hadn’t realized how much she’d begun to shake until Solas touched her arm. Just so.

“You were surrounded,” he said, his voice implacable. “You were in the heart of the enemy camp, _both_ of them, and only barest circumstance kept them from each other’s throats.”

“I was a fool,” she said firmly. “I had no resources, no bolt holes. And I _was_ discovered—the Templars saw me and noted who I was every day. I meant to flee, towards the end, make my way back north and tell the Clan to pull their stakes and retreat to the heart of the mountains until all this madness ended, but I knew that this was the eye of the storm. I knew that as soon as I left the confines of the Temple I would be ready game.”

“What did the mages plan to do, once the talks were concluded?” Solas asked, sounding genuinely puzzled.

She took another breath. “Fight to the death I suppose.” She took a step away, maintaining her distance as much for his sake as for hers. “They were not, on the whole, going well.”

“Haven had no word,” he said thoughtfully. “After the first day or two, all news just, stopped. I had expected as much.”

He did not reach out to her again, but he stood beside her now, not two paces behind as if she were a wild animal he was mildly concerned would lunge for his throat lips-first. She was greatly relieved at his comfiture—it bolstered her own, and the reminder of her earlier humiliation was, on some level, a reassuring contrast to her present emotional state.

She wished he hadn’t said—

Oh, Creators.

“I wasn’t traumatized by this,” she said quickly. Her shoulders were tight around her ears, and the stone hard and unforgiving under her feet. It wasn’t like the ground; it didn’t sink to welcome you. You had to push back.

“I did not say you were,” he said. “Only that it would understandable. Only that you had every right.”

She turned on him. “If I were traumatized,” she said, “I would not be able to do what I am presently doing. I would not be able to rise, every day, and do what needs to be done.”

He blinked at her.

Very softly, he said, “You would. Even if your legs were cut from under you, you would.”

Laeta made a thick, disgusted noise in the back of her throat, and began to walk away from the Temple.

After a moment, he followed.

“It wasn’t long,” she said shortly, picking her away across the cobblestones that made up the courtyard. “They couldn’t maintain that kind of tension and not break. I saw the Divine once, from a distance, standing above the crowd and imploring them to keep the peace.”

Looking up, she saw her, as she knew she was going to. The Divine’s robe gleamed like a falling star as she stood on a platform above the heads of the surrounding people—arms spread, and fingers outstretched as to calm them all by sheer force of personality.

She could have done it too, Laeta thought. If anyone could have.

 _I_ couldn’t have, she thought. Not even now.

She turned, suddenly.

“This won’t work,” she said as flatly as she could. “I remember this. I never had a problem remembering this. It isn’t simply a problem of not _wanting_ to.”

“We can stop, any time you wish.” he said without missing a beat. His eyes were half-closed, sleepy and removed. It was his daytime face, she realized, not the glad, sharp expression he usually wore in the Fade.

Yes, she thought, we can just sit here quietly and not look at each other until the herbs wear off. Then I can wake up, have Iron Bull dig me a very deep hole, and inter myself until the end of time.

The worst part of it was, she did want to leave, and the sooner the better.

But there was too much riding on this. Cassandra needed to know. Leliana needed to know. She needed to know, if only to figure out whether or not the blame for the explosion lay on Corypheus’s lopsided nightmare of a head and not hers.

She could feel herself losing control of her equilibrium, and hated it as bitterly as she’d ever hated anything else. This had all started out with her losing control of herself, and had only carried on from there. There was nothing to be gained from this exercise, she should have known that before they ever even began, she knew—

Her hands were over her eyes again. But what she was feeling was worse than humiliation now, worse than embarrassment. It was the foreknowledge of something terrible and inevitable treading her way with slow and heavy steps. It was knowing that everyone here, even the people who frightened her, even the Tranquil, who had soiled themselves in the open air and not even asked to be taken better care of—

“They’re going to die,” she said, numbly.

Solas said nothing. The Temple was silent around them once more, as if waiting for her permission to continue its slow grind towards the end.

Laeta inhaled, then let it out in a rush. “They deserve—I can’t stop. Not if...”

She dragged her hands down her face, scrubbing it clean, and hopefully wiping her expression away along with it. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “This is more difficult than I thought it would be. We should move on.”

The arm at her elbow made her pause. She hadn’t even heard him move closer.

“Sit a moment,” he said, but muffled somehow. Tinny.

She was losing track again, losing focus. It was different, and worse than in the waking world. Her defenses were weaker here, and her ability to maneuver and distract herself hampered as well. There was no room to maneuver—just things she didn’t want to look at that she very much must.

“Sit,” he said again, clearer this time. That must have been him firming up the world around them. She no longer envied being a Dreamer—she never wanted any part of dreams again—but she did envy his calm.

His hand was on her back, as warm as a coal. He guided her to an alcove where a stone bench sat in the shade. The backs of her knees connected with it at first—she hesitated, and then she sat with him beside her.

Her voice was muffled, but that was only because she was speaking into her hands once more. “I’m very sorry about this.”

“Please do not apologize.”

She dimly recognized the voice coming from her mouth as hers, but as soon as she heard what she said she honestly doubted it. “If it would make it better, I would try kissing you again, but I don’t think it would help.”

“Please do not…. strain yourself on my behalf.”

She snorted, but it was a helpless, shaky sort of sound that did not denote a great deal of composure. His hand remained on her shoulder blade, steady and sure as a promise, and he did not act as though he were uncomfortable. It was a small—but immense—kindness.

His other hand came up to her chest before she could register him moving. Very slowly, he pressed down right at the center of her clavicle.

“Exhale,” he said very gently. “As far as you can.”

She did so, far too quickly at first, but he slowly increased the pressure on her breastbone with the center of his palm and helped her squeeze the last of the air out of her lungs. He held it for a beat, then just as slowly released the pressure, letting her draw in a slow, measured breath to the top of her capacity.

He did this twice more.

At the end, the muscles in her chest that had drawn to the breaking point were filled with blood and air once more, and she felt the better for it. She felt as though she were a thing in a body once more, rather than an overwhelming urge to escape.

Solas had let his hand drop from her back, but let the one at her collarbone remain. He let it rise, sketching the column of her throat before slipping behind to cradle the back of her neck, one thumb at her pulsepoint.

It was not sexual. It was every bit as sexual as a visit from the clan healer, who was eighty five and had frighteningly sharp canine teeth and believed leeches at key pressure points would alleviate everything from insomnia to gout. If it _had_ been sexual, Laeta would have suspected Solas was only capable of being attracted to her when she was a sniveling wreck, and that would have been the end of things immediately.

He was comforting her. He was calming her down.

It was an expression of care the likes of which she had not received since she left home all those months ago, and if she was truly being very honest, never expected to receive again.

And it undid her. As nothing else might have.

“Oh dear,” she said thickly. “Ohhhhh Creators, I may dribble on you, be careful-”

“Pay it no mind,” he murmured.

“It’s not real, I know that,” she said. “Fade snot _isn’t_ real, is it?”

“As far as I understand such things, no.” His voice lifted slightly. “But it raises several fascinating questions.”

She groaned and leaned into him, and bless him, he let her. His chin collided briefly with her temple, and the rough wool forming his bewildering wrap-like shirt scratched at her lower cheek, but they managed things eventually.

They made an odd, incongruous picture on the bench, she could only assume, but if he was happy to offer what she needed then she wouldn’t draw attention to it.

At long last, after she had a chance to gather herself up once more, he began to speak.

“I do not think,” he said softly against her ear, “that you are fighting this. That it is simply a case of you not wishing to remember.”

“I do,” she said, drawing her hands back into fists where they rested on her knees. “I—it would answer so many questions. It could help us prepare for so much.”

His hand firmed on her neck, then relaxed. His thumb moved, traveling from her pulse point to the long muscles traveling up the back of her neck, and pressed down.

“I think,” he said carefully, his breath barely stirring the tendrils of hair surrounding her face, “that if you were to remember in an instant, everything that had happened, every fragment that surrounded the events of that day, that you would use it to help the Inquisition. And I believe that remembering so quickly would damage you very much.”

“That doesn’t matter,” she said without thinking.

“It does,” he said flatly, and without hesitation. He released her neck. “But,” he said, his tone lighter, “I am here, and you are as well. Perhaps together we can avoid the worst of it.”

Oh dear, she thought with utter sincerity.

Solas’s capacity for comfort seemed to be both on a time-released mechanism and of limited means, because with that he disengaged completely. Laeta did not feel bereft, but bolstered. People let you go when they knew you could stand on your own. Unless you were being dropped, which felt…. different. Generally.

She looked down for lack of anything better to do, then smiled.

Halla leather and rustic wool. Fitted as close as a second skin, and just as easy to move in.

She squinted at him. “Was that you, or me?”

He wrinkled his nose in return. “Fashion is not… generally how my expertise lends itself. But you look very well,” he added generously. “Less—er. Lost in the confusion.”

“Maker forbid,” she muttered. “I mean—ugh, whoever. We should keep moving.”

“Maker willing,” he said blandly, but the corner of his mouth jerked upwards as she echoed her own ugh and rose to her feet.

The courtyard had emptied in the span of one breath to the next, all the spirits banished, whether by Solas’s doing or by some disinterest on their part. Laeta was calmer now. She saw more.

It was a very poor copy, she noted at last.

Bare bones. The mere suggestion of forms, with her memory filling in the rest. The Temple was as stark and clear as she remembered it, but then, it was iconic. It had made an impression. All around it, however, what had been stables and outbuildings and wells and statuary faded into…. nothing much very interesting at all. And certainly not what she needed to remember.

“It’s… fake,” she said, her voice sounding stuffy in a space that suddenly didn’t seem as wide-open as it once did. “It’s not real.”

And immediately felt like a fool, as Solas laughed almost as soon as the words left her mouth. She looked at him, her chin lifted, but he shook his head to banish any degree of unkindness and looked away, swallowing the tail end of what looked like a snicker.

His eyes still smiled at her though; that was the worst part.

She dismissed him entirely in favor of the task at hand, her feet scuffing along a surface that no longer felt like centuries-old cobblestones. The path was clear, however, and wound up the mountainside to several smaller, though no less grand buildings that lay up ahead.

“I went this way,” she said distantly.  “The talks… were getting worse. The Divine had left the negotiation chambers some hours before, and everyone was wrangling in her absence. I wanted—”

She trailed off. Then, more thoughtfully, “I’m not sure what I wanted.”

“To get closer to her? For information, perhaps,” said Solas, leaning on his staff.

“No,” she shook her head. “I’d had my fill. I fancied—well. I suppose I just wanted to get a good look at her. To see if she knew, or cared, how badly she had managed all of this. I wanted to see her face, to see if she was _aware_ of-”

Laeta stopped, feeling herself waver like a candle too close to the window. She chose her next words carefully. “Of what people had sacrificed to be here.”

“You wanted to look at the face of power, and see if it were capable of flinching.”

She shot him a distinctly unimpressed look.

Solas blinked back at her, as benign as the skin on a mug of lukewarm milk. _Am I wrong?_ his face somehow said.

Laeta was beginning to feel more than a little transparent. But, she thought with a little twist of rueful gratitude, she supposed her transparency, rather than her arch inscrutability, was why he was here helping her in the first place.

She struggled to set the order of events in her mind. It had been sunset when she’d actually made this walk. On the fourth day of the talks, when every minute seemed to inch closer to the final snap of any pretense of civility or democratic deliberation and the inevitable bloodbath that would result. The sinking sun had washed the Temple in shades of gold and ochre where it didn’t leech it from color until it was as pale as old bones.

Now, only the suggestion of it remained. Enough to keep her focused. Enough to remind her.

She saw the door long before she should have as she continued picking her way up the path. It was the only concrete thing in a sea of shadows. Solas lifted his head almost as soon as she did.

“I imagine,” he said, “that there is our destination. Do you remember what followed?”

She shook her head.

She didn’t realize she had stopped until far later. Solas had not said a word, only watched her. He wasn’t one for breaking silences.

At long last, she said, “I heard something. It drew me.”

Solas turned his head slightly, listening. The fact that neither of them heard anything did not seem to be worth mentioning.

The world had gone dim and airless as a forgotten cupboard, washed clean of everything save the forbidding clarity of the door before them. She did not shake. There was nothing left in her to rattle; she felt empty. Worse, she felt like whatever she saw when she opened that door would leave her just as empty.

“The Divine died,” she heard herself say.

It echoed, just slightly. As if the world were making space for her words once more.

She turned to face him. Her toes dug into the dreamstuff beneath her feet.

“The sky broke,” she said. “She died, I lived. Some Darkspawn took the credit. No matter what I see in there, _I wasn’t to blame.”_

It sounded like she was trying, and failing to convince herself.

“You were not,” said Solas, watching her carefully. “You could not be.” He sounded puzzled. 

Her eyes smarted.  She tried, as hard as she could, to stay present and focused. It was slipping away from her, moment by moment, but she knew that what he was saying wasn’t enough, and that what she had said wasn’t even beginning to touch her distress.

“Nothing I find out in there can change anything,” she said, feeling as if she were treading water and completely unable to do anything else. “It won’t help.”

It felt wrong, as she said it. Like it wasn’t close to enough, or didn’t describe it accurately enough. She couldn’t shake the idea that panic was making a liar out of her, and the sensation was exquisitely painful.

“Is that what you feel?” he asked flatly. “That you must provide help to any who ask, regardless of how much good it will do?”  

“ _No,_ ” she said, too quickly.

He watched her, a step or two farther away. His face was utterly unreadable.

Laeta’s fingers were crushed and bloodless in her own grip once more. The Mark rattled like a hornet in the heart of her palm, and it only ever did that when she, when she was—

She forced herself to relax.

She stopped breathing, and one by one, uncurled her fingers.

Bringing her marked hand to her chest, she pressed down, and focused as hard as she could.

She waited until her lungs were empty, in the space between one breath and the next before she thought of what she wanted to say.

“I think,” she began, then closed her eyes for her own sake.

When she had gathered her words, she sounded unspeakably tired.  “I think you’re right,” she said.  “I think that what is behind that door will upset me very much and it will be very difficult for me to live with.”

She used the dull, defeated voice reserved solely for those moments after midnight when all one’s choices are boiled down to their narrowest and meanest.

Solas watched her impassively. His face was sober, and sad, as it often was.

“But I think the Divine died doing an…   _impossible_ thing as best she knew how. I think I was what she was exchanged for. And if we—I,” she clarified, “learn how she died, then it comes closer to making it an even trade.”

Silence fell for a time. Her pulse was a hammer in her ears, and if she tried, she fancied she could hear the click of her own eyelids as she blinked.

It hurt, more than anything else she had realized in the course of this journey.

That was how she knew it was true.

The door grew no smaller, nor more significant.  It was just a door, in a side area of the Temple that lay off the beaten path and had nothing in particular to recommend it. But all those weeks ago, Laeta had heard something as she walked, a scuffle, or perhaps a scream, and she had burst through without hesitation. She remembered that much, at least.

She remembered thinking, _It’s the Templars, they’ve gotten one of the mages alone and now they’re_ —before the memory snapped off and left nothing on the other side, as if cauterized. She did not know how the explosion that caused the Breach had happened. She didn’t know if the Divine was on the other side of that door, or if it really had been some mage apprentice being brutalized in a forgotten corner. She had walked through that door, and then the memory stopped.

And then the world had broken.

As it did, occasionally.

The scenery around them had gone as dark and as flat as shadows. If this was the Fade, it was its farthest and most forgotten corner. All that was left was the door.

Solas spoke, finally. His voice was very calm. “You think it a poor trade, then?”

"Yes,” she said without hesitation. “And I have a duty.”

And duty was never about what you wanted. She knew that.

Duty was a season, like any other. You planted, you hunted, you harvested, and you did what was right because the moment called for it. And duty always came around again.

She let up the pressure on her chest. The absence of weight made her feel like she was floating.

Solas then stepped towards her.

She looked up in alarm, but by that time he had already reached her. His staff was gone—and oh _honestly_ where was he _putting_ it—and his hands were empty as he stood as close to her as he ever willingly had. She would have stepped back, but one of his hands was already at her side, not trapping her, but surprising her into stillness.

His face was very close to hers now.

“I think,” he said, softly, roughly. He tilted his head slightly, while Laeta’s heart stopped dead in her chest and briefly considered fusing completely solid.

He then spoke directly into her ear, even though she had no memory of his moving any closer.  “That you are being very especially foolish.”

She blinked.

To be honest, it felt like the entire Fade blinked with her.

When she drew her head back, he was smiling at her in a very bland and self-satisfied fashion. It was even worse than the last time.

Suddenly she had the searing thought—Oh Creators I thought he was going to kiss me before but if he does it _now_ I will _murder_ him.

Her terror rose to the breaking point—then broke, abruptly, as he did no such thing, merely squeezed her arm where his hand rested upon it and stepped back. It was both entirely appropriate and entirely predictable. It was awful.

The floating feeling didn’t go away. Rather, it intensified, warm as bubbles of champagne sinking down her spine and into the soles of her feet.

He didn’t make it better. He couldn’t—or rather no one could, but least of all him.

But it meant something to say the worst and darkest things you ever expected were actually true about yourself, and to have someone say rude things until you stopped.

It meant something that he was here, saying anything at all.

You could still feel devastated. But you could feel devastated and also as if there were people who doubted very much that your judgement was sound in doing so. Which was comforting in its own way. More or less.

“What do you want to do?” he asked finally, and very softly, his eyes fixed upon her face.

She smiled at him, unsteadily. She hoped it was one of her better ones. “I want to go back to bed.”

His eyes smiled back at her.

Then widened, abruptly, as she stepped forward and opened the door.

* * *

There was no explosion.

There was only blackness.

Why is it _laughing_ at me? was the last coherent thought she was able to have before the wave crested and broke over her head—a thousand shards of darkness stabbing into the space she and Solas occupied and dragging them behind the door with them. The darkness was hot and _shining_ all around her, invasive and endless, as corrosive as Blight and horribly, nauseatingly intimate. She choked on it, tried to find her feet, but was left with the unnerving impression that she no longer _had_ feet, much less a throat to choke with or eyes to see with.

There was just, nothing. A hot, horrid, pervasive nothing that roared around her like a gale wind and left her with the overwhelming impression that she was very small and very pitiful and worthy of mockery.

Laeta was afforded only a brief moment of being highly offended before it all became too much—too oppressive, too _loud_ —and the last of her focus broke.

She broke with it. It didn’t take very much.

That very well might have been the end of things—and the ignoble end of the Inquisition along with it—if she hadn’t had a passenger.

First there was a burst of light.

Then, of course, things became more confusing incredibly quickly, but overall she got the impression that Solas was very angry.

This in and of itself was interesting information—Laeta would be the first to admit she had some curiosity as to what that actually looked like—but unfortunately for her, what followed next was unclear.

Simply put, one minute they were there in the crushing, sniggering dark, and the next they weren’t.

More specifically, she was in bed with a splitting headache, and Solas had his head on her stomach and one of her wrists pressed to his lips.

His other hand was in her bedsheets, white-knuckled where it gripped the linen.

Laeta absorbed this for as long as it took.

Regrettably, this meant she fell back asleep within minutes.

* * *

The headache wasn’t nearly as bad when she woke up the second time, but the tips of its fingers still clawed at her as she opened her eyes, then abruptly closed them again.

It was, bright.

And she had never liked her rooms at Skyhold.

Her entire body hurt, not just her head. If she had to guess, she’d say it was dehydration from the herbs she’d taken—her mouth tasted like warm _crap_ —but she felt stretched and hammered at the same time, as if the utter dissolving she’d experienced during that last bit of the dream had had more of a physical effect. She didn’t know how she felt about that.

She needed water, however, and more importantly, she needed the chamberpot underneath her bed (the one she had found full of dead spiders the day after Sera had said that thing about jelly-todgered elves fleeing north during the rebellion, and Laeta had said something so incandescently angry that her vision had briefly whited out).

The chamberpot had to wait, unfortunately, because Solas was still there.

And his brow was furrowed at her.

He was no longer touching her, or indeed, anywhere near her at all. He sat on a chair pulled up to the bed, but leaned back in it, his long legs stretched out before him and his arms folded across his chest.

Overall, he looked very, very tired.

She stared at him a moment, blinking unsteadily as she grew used to the light. He appeared to be fine with waiting.

Laeta’s throat cracked when she tried to speak. She tried again. “I don’t think,” she said, “that that was entirely my fault.”

Levering herself up on her elbows, she almost missed the sigh that escaped Solas, but luckily, it went on for a very long time.

At last, he said very carefully, “It wasn’t.”

She thought for a moment. “Then,” she said, “if it wasn’t _yours—_ ”

He shot her a look. It was prohibitively dry.

“Well,” she said.

They sat in silence some more.

“.... Thoughts?” she said finally, the knobs on the headboard digging into her kidneys.

He opened his mouth, closed it, then appeared to think once more.

Finally, he said, “Have you, in recent memory, come across the attentions of an ancient and powerful demon who somehow had physical access to you?”

She thought back. It was difficult to do, with the chamberpot so close within reach.

“...No?” she offered.

Solas’s frown deepened.

Leaning forward, he steepled his fingers before him and tipped them towards her. “We went into the Fade, in a sleeping state, to see what we could recreate of your memories of the Conclave, and restore what you thought lost.”

“Yes, I believe so,” she said agreeably. She was still woozy enough to be agreeable about just about anything. It wasn’t hard.

“They weren’t.”

“Mmmn,” she said as she sank back down into the puddle of blankets once more. Ah yes. Much better. More, horizontal.

“They were eaten,” he said. “And whatever ate them left you… a gift.”

 _Creators_ but she needed that chamberpot.

“But what I don’t understand,” said Solas testily, “is why you _opened_ it.”

“Solas,” she said, muffled from the pillow she’d drawn over her eyes to block out the worst of the light. “What you are saying is valid, insightful and worth exploring.”

Solas appeared to digest this.

Finally, with the tone of someone utterly resigned to a regrettable course of action, he said, “But you would prefer to discuss this another time.”

“After breakfast,” she said. Then, more thoughtfully, “And a bath.” Then even more thoughtfully, “And possibly a drink.”

“Then,” he said wearily, “I will…. leave you to your work.”

He rose from his chair almost as slowly and painfully as she would have done. It made her conscience twinge.

“Solas—wait,” she said, and reached for him. She was able to catch his hand where it was closest to her bed, and he did not pull away. His fingers were as cold as ice, which troubled her. How much effort had he expended after all? she thought.

He stopped, and looked down at her.

Her voice was just as hoarse, and her thoughts still pulled apart in warm strings like taffy in the sun, but she had it in her for this. “Thank you,” she said, and squeezed his fingers with her own. “Thank you for helping me.”

Solas blinked at her, caught between his departure and her hold on him.

He wavered; she saw that. She didn’t know if it was exhaustion, or something else, but he hesitated.

But then he smiled. Sweet as a glimpse of sunlight on his long, solemn face.

Her face flushed hot and dark almost immediately, but he didn’t comment on it. He never would; she knew that.

He squeezed her fingers back. And then he surprised her still further by reaching down, and delicately tucked her hair behind her ear.

It was not a kiss. She knew by now that he was not remotely convinced that kissing her was very wise at all, but it was shocking and warm and deeply intimate and it had rather the same effect.

She kept her face very still, so he would not regret it.

“You are very welcome,” he said softly.

And with that, he turned and walked stiffly to the stairs leading down from her chambers.

Laeta waited until the door shut behind him and he had had time enough to get a fair distance away.

Then, to the ceiling, said quite emphatically, “Oh dear.”

* * *

****  
  



End file.
